The nationwide economic recession has cost tens of thousands their jobs, forced millions into foreclosure and resulted in countless bankruptcy filings. Despite their best efforts, many people are falling behind on mortgage payments due to financial circumstances beyond their control. In an effort to avoid foreclosure, more and more people are seeking loan modifications as a way to lower payments temporarily (or permanently), making them more affordable and making keeping the home a real possibility. Unfortunately, at a time when foreclosures are at a record high, unscrupulous ...

Researchers of Apoptosis and Cancer Group of the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL) have found that a small molecule, Nutlin-3a, an antagonist of MDM2 protein, stimulates the signalling pathway of another protein, p53. By this way, it induces cell death and senescence (loss of proliferative capacity) in brain cancer, a fact that slows its growth. These results open the door for MDM2 agonists as new treatments for glioblastomas. The study has been published at the journal PLoS ONE. Glioblastoma multiforme is the most common brain tumour in adults and the ...

In a multicellular organism, different cells fulfill a range of diversified functions. Often such specialization depends on the delivery of molecular goods to distinct places within a cell. It ensures that particular functions only occur at defined cellular sites. This establishment of intracellular asymmetry in the otherwise fluid environment of the cell cytoplasm requires active transport processes. Messenger RNAs (mRNA) represent an especially important type of freight. They are copies of genetic information stored in the nucleus. In the cytoplasm the information encoded ...

Expectant mothers are familiar with the procedure: the physician examines them with an ultrasound apparatus that displays lifelike images of the fetus on the monitor. The application of this technology has been customary in medicine for years; in materials testing though, it has been used only in relatively rudimentary form to date. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Non-Destructive Testing IZFP in Saarbrücken have adapted the conventional sonar procedure – a simple ultrasound method – and have succeeded in generating three-dimensional images with the aid of innovative ...

Prosecutors trust that the information they receive from crime labs is correct and accurate. The results from tests run at the lab are used to help build cases against those accused of crimes. When this information is inaccurate it can lead to questions for both past and future cases, and in some instances, lead to innocent people being convicted of crimes they did not commit. The Nassau County crime lab recently became the only police lab in the nation to completely close its doors due to its inability to follow procedures. The lab's troubles started in December 2010. ...

It turns out to be difficult to find out exactly how much a child who cannot yet speak suffers after a surgical operation. Researchers at the University Hospital of La Paz, in Madrid, have validated the 'Llanto' scale, the first, and only, tool in Spanish which measures infant pain rapidly and simply. "The lack of appropriate tools prevents health professionals from knowing if a pre-verbal child who cannot tell us how much a surgical wound hurts, is being treated correctly", explains Francisco Reinoso, lead author of the study and head of the section of Paediatric Anaesthesia ...

BATON ROUGE – On the one year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that took the lives of 11 men and devastated the livelihoods of many residents of coastal Louisiana, it's difficult to put the complicated relationship between people and oil into perspective. While the environmental impacts have thus far not been as pervasive as originally feared, most scientists are in agreement that it is still simply too early to tell. However, dependence upon oil has not lessened over the past year, laying the groundwork for some very significant debates between environmentalists ...

The Northeast has seen three tour bus accidents in less than a month. On March 21, a New Jersey-based PRT tour bus rolled over in New Hampshire, seriously injuring five people. The bus was travelling to Boston from Quebec, carrying 25 Koreans. The driver apparently lost control on a snowy highway. On March 15, a bus headed from Chinatown to Philadelphia crashed on the New Jersey Turnpike in East Brunswick, killing two, the driver and a passenger. The worst accident of the three happened on March 12, with 15 passengers killed when a Worldwide Tours Bus headed to ...

Is the vacuum-packed chicken leg really still fresh and edible? Looks alone do not tell the whole story. And the "best-before" date is no guarantee, either. Scandals involving the sale of rotten meat have added to the uncertainty, and the customer him- or herself may be shortening the shelf life through improper storage. This is an area in which a sensor film developed by the Fraunhofer Research Institution for Modular Solid State Technologies EMFT in Munich can immediately give a green – or rather: yellow light, or warn of spoiled goods. EMFT developed the film in a project ...

California Family Courts deal with a huge volume of traffic every year. Just the Los Angeles Superior Court -- Family Law handles 100,000 filings per year. The high number of filings combined with the fact that over 70 percent of litigants in family law are unrepresented -- meaning they don't have an attorney -- many courts have adopted local rules and procedures in an attempt to more efficiently process the high volume of family law cases. While some of these rules and procedures help speed up the process, the price that efficiency comes at was the virtual elimination ...

This image, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows a group of interacting galaxies called Arp 273. The larger of the spiral galaxies, known as UGC 1810, has a disc that is tidally distorted into a rose-like shape by the gravitational pull of the companion galaxy below it, known as UGC 1813. The swathe of blue jewels across the top is the combined light from clusters of intensely bright and hot young blue stars. These massive stars glow fiercely in ultraviolet light. The smaller, nearly edge-on companion shows distinct signs of intense star formation at its ...

While the foreclosure crisis has had a devastating effect on the real estate market, loan modifications have been equally as troubling for struggling homeowners. The Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) was supposed to help millions of Americans struggling to pay their mortgages by modifying home loans to reflect the current value of their properties. Unfortunately, HAMP has not been as effective as first contemplated. As of March 2011, less than 500,000 mortgages have been modified through this program, when it was estimated that 3-4 million mortgages would be ...

Thanks to a certain protein, rhesus monkeys are resistant to HIV. Known as TRIM5, the protein prevents the HI virus from multiplying once it has entered the cell. Researchers from the universities of Geneva and Zurich have now discovered the protein's mechanism, as they report in Nature. This also opens up new prospects for fighting HIV in humans. Unlike people, certain monkey species, such as rhesus or night monkeys, are resistant to HIV thanks to TRIM5, a cellular protein: In the case of an HIV infection, the protein intercepts the virus as soon as it enters the ...

BOSTON (April 20, 2011, 5pm ET) − Eating more n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids, commonly known as omega-3 fatty acids, may help carriers of a genetic variant on the perilipin 4 (PLIN4) gene locus lose weight more efficiently. Based on this observation, researchers at the Jean Mayer Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (USDA HNRCA) at Tufts University identified a microRNA (miRNA) which may elucidate the underlying biological mechanism. Led by Jose M. Ordovas, PhD, director of the Nutrition and Genomics Laboratory at the USDA HNRCA, researchers genotyped seven ...

A new study from the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry finds that mothers who feed their babies breast milk exclusively, as opposed to formula, are more likely to bond emotionally with their child during the first few months after delivery. The breastfeeding mothers surveyed for the study showed greater responses to their infant's cry in brain regions related to caregiving behavior and empathy than mothers who relied upon formula as the baby's main food source. This is the first paper to examine the underlying neurobiological mechanisms as a function of breastfeeding, ...

In February 2011, U.S. President Barack Obama made the ground-breaking announcement that his administration would no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which bans federal recognition of same-sex marriages. While the change in federal DOMA enforcement is a great stride forward in equal rights for the LGBT community, there are still alarming conflicts between federal law and Washington state law. If you are considering registering for a domestic partnership, are in a registered domestic partnership or if you advise people who are in a registered domestic partnerships, ...

The passwords of the future could become more secure and, at the same time, simpler to use. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden have been inspired by the physics of critical phenomena in their attempts to significantly improve password protection. The researchers split a password into two sections. With the first, easy to memorize section they encrypt a Captcha – an image that computer programs per se have difficulty in deciphering. The researchers also make it more difficult for computers, whose task it is to automatically ...

When Congress' recent revisions to federal laws governing credit card usage went into effect, some consumers saw interest rates double or even triple. The law now allows for credit providers to be more flexible with interest rate raises, provided they give the cardholders notice of the action and share information about the total amount of the debt and approximately how long it will take to pay it off. The changes in the law were initially introduced as a way to protect consumers, but, in practice they are much more biased toward lenders. Following the enacting of those ...

New York, NY, April 20, 2011 - A 20-member blue-ribbon panel, the Study Group on Corporate Boards, co-sponsored by Columbia Business School and the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware, today released "Bridging Board Gaps," a report designed to improve board performance and effectiveness by offering a series of recommendations in critical areas of governance. The report calls for a renewed commitment to the purpose of corporate boards, and suggests guidelines to improve board practices and standards along seven core dimensions: ...

WASHINGTON — Those childhood music lessons could pay off decades later - even for those who no longer play an instrument – by keeping the mind sharper as people age, according to a preliminary study published by the American Psychological Association. The study recruited 70 healthy adults age 60 to 83 who were divided into groups based on their levels of musical experience. The musicians performed better on several cognitive tests than individuals who had never studied an instrument or learned how to read music. The research findings were published online in the APA ...

Scientists are reporting development of a new battery that extracts and stores energy produced from the difference in saltiness at the point where freshwater in rivers flows into oceans. A report on the battery, which could supply about 13 percent of the world's energy needs, appears in ACS' journal Nano Letters. Yi Cui and colleagues cite the intensive global scientific effort to develop renewable energy sources to supplement supplies of oil and other traditional fuels like coal, which contribute to global warming. Solar, wind, and geothermal are renewable, sustainable ...

New technology that combines production of electricity with capture of carbon dioxide could make billions of barrels of oil shale — now regarded as off-limits because of the huge amounts of carbon dioxide released in its production — available as an energy source in a greenhouse world of the future. That's the conclusion of a report on "electricity production with in situ carbon capture" (EPICC) in ACS' journal Energy & Fuels. Adam Brandt and Hiren Mulchandani explain that almost 3 trillion barrels of oil are trapped in the world's deposits of oil-shale, a dark-colored ...

The North Carolina Legislature is considering proposed medical malpractice legislation that would limit damages for non-economic damages. The state has already enacted a law that caps monetary damages in negligence cases to $1 million where the parties agree to go to binding arbitration, but Bloomberg reports that few have actually exercised this option. Proposed Malpractice Damage Cap The legislation calls for a limit of $250,000 on non-economic damages, which include compensation for pain and suffering, disfigurement, mutilation, loss of a limb, paralysis, and death. ...

A needle-in-the-haystack search through nearly 390,000 chemical compounds had led scientists to a substance that can sneak through the protective barrier surrounding the brain with effects promising for new drugs for Parkinson's and Huntington's disease. They report on the substance, which blocks formation of cholesterol in the brain, in the journal, ACS Chemical Biology. Aleksey G. Kazantsev and colleagues previously discovered that blocking cholesterol formation in the brain could protect against some of the damage caused by chronic brain disorders like Parkinson's ...

The costly, often-frustrating quest for new ways of preventing and treating diseases that strike vegetables, fruits, and other food crops bears striking similarity to the better-known saga of the pharmaceutical industry's pricey search for new drugs for humans. That's the topic of an article in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), ACS' weekly newsmagazine. C&EN Senior Business Editor Melody M. Bomgardner points out that the R&D investment in new herbicides, fungicides, and other plant chemicals almost rivals that for human pharmaceuticals on a one ...